Mitchell Harris Wines at Spring Graze Ballarat

A few pictures from a great night at Lydiard Wine Bar this week. Spring Graze was a satellite event of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and showcased the best of fresh spring produce along with the range of Mitchell Harris wines.

We hand-disgorged a dozen bottles of our new sparkling, Sabre, which was served with fresh plump oysters. The dry, aperitif style was a brilliant match for this seafood canapé.

A Thai salad of spanner crab showed off chef Damien Jones' heritage in Thai cuisine brilliantly, and was matched with our 2011 Sauvignon Blanc Fumé, and our 2011 Rosé.

Through the night we patched in Johnno from his wine-show judging in Canberra, to introduce the sneak preview of Sabre. A great way to bring him in as a part of the evening, but obviously he would have preferred to indulge....

An incredible main of a rare rolled roast of Goldfields Spring Lamb was some of the best lamb I've ever tasted, and a brilliant centrepiece with our reds, 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon and 2009 Shiraz.

And a sublime way to finish the night was a dessert of blue cheese, pear and apple, matched with the fruit richness of our Special Release Muscat.

Make sure if you get a chance to drop into Lydiard Wine Bar in Ballarat

Special thanks to Alicia's sister Sally for the gorgeous images...

 www.sallymckay.com.au 

Just a Minute... The Mitchell Harris 2011 Sauvignon Blanc Fumé

Mitch and Johnno have a quick squiz at some beaut Sauvignon Blanc juice picked this week in the Pyrenees.

The cool 2011 looks a terrific vintage for our latest Fumé....

Crowd-sourcing the new Mitchell Harris Sangiovese

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In the sensational Pyrenees red-wine vintage of 2010, we were lucky enough to get our hands on some terrific Sangiovese fruit from Shays Flat, near Landsborough on the western edge of the Pyrenees.

An offer too good to pass up, it left us with a little bit of a problem; we'd never made Sangiovese before!

So, what to do? First, we bled off some of the juice in a saignée fashion, to create about half of our Mitchell Harris Rosé 2010 (the other half being Macedon Pinot Noir.) The remainder has now been maturing in old oak hogsheads for about a year now, and it's time to work out what to do with it!

Options included :

• Doing nothing, bottling up as is...

• Blending with some beautiful Pyrenees Shiraz for some bright fruit.

• And/or blending in some Cabernet Sauvignon in a Super-Tuscan style.

With thanks to Anthony d'Anna at Boccaccio Cellars in Melbourne, we put together a bunch of great Australian Sangioveses, and some Italian Chiantis to match the Mitchell Harris offerings against.

It was time to get some clever heads and palates together...

We gathered a few folk together, some from the wine & food scene here in Ballarat, a couple of Sangio-loving medicos and even a couple of ex-Sommeliers for a blind benchmark tasting.

Nine great wines were tasted, and what did we find?

• Australia has some absolutely brilliant Sangioveses, that match it with the Italians any day...

• The straight Mitchell Harris Sangiovese was very much a favourite, and certainly more popular than our blended trials.

• We should all be drinking more of this great food matching wine.

So do yourself a favour, get some Sangiovese into your cellar or onto your table, and while you're at it, keep an eye out for the "crowd-sourced" Mitchell Harris Pyrenees Sangiovese 2010!